The cause of James’ injuries has never been reveled. I know at one point I saw a sketch of him in his circus days with his wings and tail intact, but that still leaves a several decade span in which the injuries could have happened.

Plus if I wanted to avoid scaring my kids about a very important mantle one of them is probably going to have to take up in the future, saying an injury inflicted in the process of defending said mantle was a circus accident would be a pretty good excuse

Going back through the soundtrack recording, no track is named “Sean’s Theme”, but there’s a phrase on a bass fiddle (“Toom-tum, toom-tum, toom toodle-oodle-oodle-loo, toom-tum, toom-tum, toom toodle-oodle-oodle-loo”) that’s especially featured in the track named “Prelude to the Big Fight”.

YES! Go James! You tell him. Ravi’s face! “I did done messed up,” priceless. Go James you show him. Oh, James’ injuries were due to being a cave guardian. You, Ravi,have really messed up if James is a Veteran and has the scars to prove it.

I think all of us readers were expecting Ravi to give some Real Answers.
Instead all we got were disjointed tiny fragments, useless on their own, in conjunction with Ravi’s wildly swinging personality, and his uncaring attitude to the harm he was causing to the other characters in the strip.
And the harm has not yet finished. I’m sure you recall the final panel of chapter 1.

I think the answers are still coming, once Ravi stops fuming and sits down and thinks about the how and why the fins lost his powers. It’s fairly obvious that he expected it to be fairly consistent, not skip-and-go.

Nope, still whining. The self-righteousness of these oathbreakers is appalling. If they showed a single iota of remorse or regret, I could get behind them.

Yes, you accepted a great oath. You do NOT get to martyr act over it.
Yes, being beloved heros of your people (as is implied quite frequently) comes with a cost.
Yes, you absolutely should have kept track of knowledge that was pertinent to the oath.
Grow up.

Also, Ravi is (mostly) not yelling at them for not having the magic, he’s yelling at them for forgetting. Again, they need to take responsibility for forgetting, they need to stop acting like the universe is supposed to be fair. They are nobles, they sacrifice fairness in their own lives to increase the fairness in everyone else’s lives.

I think part of his problem is that no one told him that his gift had stopped working. Obviously it keeps working even when the Griffin in question is not near him. (Jim’s hair still grew in America) so the magic would not have stopped working the moment he left, there just would not have been any new ones born while he was gone. This probably left the griffins confused as to why the magic had gone away, so they just got on without it.

Ravi probably feels that they shoudl have contacted him, and told him it wasn’t working. But you can’t exactly guard a cave in England and go to India at the same time. He’s spent centuries assuming everything was fine, because he never heard from them. Now he finds out that it wasn’t fine, but no one told him that. He probably feels that they must not have cared very much about this gift if they didn’t even come ask him about it when it stopped working.

I would guess like many people caught in a mistake, he’s trying to blame everyone else involved rather than admit that he is partly responsible. I say partly because he had no way of knowing what would happen when he went back to India, and if someone had come and gotten him right away, he probably could have fixed it generations ago. Of course,t hat relies on the griffins diagnosing the cause of the failure of a magical gift that they clearly didn’t know how worked the first place.

TL:DR It’s time for Ravi to apologize, even if it isn’t ALL his fault.

He’s spent centuries assuming everything was fine, because he never heard from them. Now he finds out that it wasn’t fine, but no one told him that. He probably feels that they must not have cared very much about this gift if they didn’t even come ask him about it when it stopped working.

On the other hand, he didn’t exactly go back to England and check in with them, either. He’s (potentially) immortal with (potentially) near-godlike powers; I feel like there’s a sense of arrogance and self-importance that kind of comes along with that. This then led him to assume that nothing could go wrong with his plan, so he never bothered to check in. (Actually, it led him to assume a lot of things, most of which have turned out to not be the case.)

That same arrogance would make it difficult for him to admit that he is partly responsible for the current state of affairs, so I think you’re right on target with that assessment. I agree with you that he isn’t wholly to blame, if only because he had no way of knowing his influence would be cut off when he returned to India. I’m just saying the failure to communicate goes both ways… they never tried to contact him to let him know that the gift wasn’t working, but he never tried to contact them either.

That’s a fair point, but did Jimothy specifically say there’s no mention of Ravi, or just that there’s no mention of a “human-looking guy”? I don’t remember. It’s been established that Ravi was not a “human-looking guy” at the time. It’s also been established that Jim doesn’t have the world’s longest attention span (look how quickly he forgot about the family lunch back in Handshakes). The name Ravi might have been mentioned and Jim has forgotten, or wasn’t paying attention.

You focussed on the second sentence of Jim’s reply to Ravi in page 33. It’s the first sentence that is the more telling point.
“Hmmm, you’d think someone that important would have been mentioned once or twice in out family history.”
While Jim is thinking that Ravi would have been mentioned as a ‘human looking guy’ in the Finn Family Histories, Jim overlooked what he himself meant, that there isn’t any mention of anyone called Ravi.http://www.skindeepcomic.com/archive/illumination-33-splendid/#comments

Stopping to properly look at things, throws up another question about Ravi.
Just what name was he travelling under back at the time of The Great War.

We already know from Ravi himself that he wasn’t travelling as a human, back then. We all just assumed that he was using the name Ravi back then. It wasn’t till I started on this reply that the further question even occoured to me, Mark.

This gives me an idea of another possibility, maybe they DID try to contact him when the gift stopped working, but because of a different name, shape, or the fact that India is a big place they were unable to find him. Think about what that would look like to them. He gave them a gift, then took it and vanished. They keep guarding because they also believe the egg is important, but they have no reason not to write Ravi out of the history after he Aparently abandoned them.

The implication of that first sentence of Jim’s is that no-one with the abilities of Ravi is recorded in the Finn Family Histories.

Now while Phineas the Red may well have told his daughter what he could have, about Ravi, she could not have gone to India to try to find him, as she has the Curse and as a result is a Cave Guardian.
We do not, yet, know if Phineas the Red had any other children, so it would be they, or Phineas II’s children who would have had to try to find Ravi, without ever having seen him.

But if such a search did happen, then wouldn’t Jim have known of that from the information to hand about Phineas II? Remember that Jim did take a LOT of interest in the Finn Family Histories about Phineas II because she had the same variant of the Curse as he has.

Because of that, I doubt very much that such a search was even considered for attempting, much less actually attempted.

We already know from Ravi himself that he wasn’t travelling as a human, back then. We all just assumed that he was using the name Ravi back then. It wasn’t till I started on this reply that the further question even occoured to me, Mark.

Fair point. For that matter, I didn’t think about the further question until you pointed it out! I also assumed that he was using the name Ravi back then.

8oo years ago the Finns were charged with protecting the Egg by Ravi who gave them elemental powers to do so. He presumed the powers would be continuously passed down over the generations when Phineas II was born with the Green version of the power and (possibly) other kids were born with other versions of it.

Ravi left for India (which, by the way, wouldn’t exist as we know it until around 1951) sometime after that. At the time he did not look human. How often he can shapeshift we don’t know, but if it’s like others we’ve seen then presumably he could do it at will. He might even be able to change genders and there’s no indication he gave the Finns any means of identifying him regardless of his form or current name (even if he didn’t change it, how many Ravis are in India?). So even if the Finns were to go looking for him he could have both a different name and a different species (and, possibly, even a different gender): how, exactly, were they going to find him?

Also, when he went to India it’d be about the Late Classic Period, meaning there were something like five different countries there. It’s not like he’d left them a forwarding address. Also, they couldn’t be too explicit in why they wanted him back (remember, the reason not much more is known is because written records about the Egg are too dangerous to keep).

So they’re to blame, how, exactly? Because they couldn’t find a guy that can change his name and species (and, maybe, gender) possibly at will in a different area of the world that had at least five different countries at the time they would have been looking, while also not being able to speak too freely about why they wanted the guy (or gal) and were not given any particular way to identify Ravi in any other form nor a location he’d most likely to be found?

And even if he did occasionally come back (causing the ‘curse’ to manifest again), he never did contact the family again or check in on them. They were there and, presumably, there’s some way he knew the Egg was still fine. So he pops in for maybe a few decades, watches the family without contacting them, and then goes back to India. And it’s *their* fault?

Considering everything else that Ravi has claimed so far, that if he did have to show his true form to the other characters in the comic, could we REALLY be sure it IS his true form that he is showing.

That would be a major change of style for Ravi, considering that initially, Kory had him looking like a preying mantis, and she continued that line of thinking in chapter 1 by having Bhadraksh working in Ravi’s shop, and the preying mantis portraits on the wall in the kitchen.

They’ve been out since panel 6 on page 6.
Ravi started his tirade near the end of page 5, and it was how he reacted and what he claimed in response to what James says at the start of page 6, that pushed James too far.

Been reading through it all again and on this run I notice that from here on Martha’s muzzle colour changed from being white to dark grey. I think in the next chapter it goes back to being white. Might that just be a choice to switch it up on her part or does that link to James’ mood at all?